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Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run ThemTue, 31 Mar 2015 19:48:35 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Calxeda Closes Shop, Attempts to Restructurehttp://www.hpcwire.com/2014/01/06/calxeda-closes-shop-attempts-restructure/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=calxeda-closes-shop-attempts-restructure
http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/01/06/calxeda-closes-shop-attempts-restructure/#commentsMon, 06 Jan 2014 22:32:22 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=2971On December 19, 2013, news broke that Austin-based ARM server chip pioneer Calxeda had ceased operations. This came as a surprise to many, especially supporters of ARM servers as an alternative to x86 dominance. EnterpriseTech‘s Timothy Prickett Morgan reports that despite the closing, Calxeda’s technology could live on, depending on who is willing to purchase

]]>On December 19, 2013, news broke that Austin-based ARM server chip pioneer Calxeda had ceased operations. This came as a surprise to many, especially supporters of ARM servers as an alternative to x86 dominance. EnterpriseTech‘s Timothy Prickett Morgan reports that despite the closing, Calxeda’s technology could live on, depending on who is willing to purchase said technology and at what price Calxeda’s investors are willing to part with it.

“Any current ARM server chip maker could be interested in acquiring the assets of Calxeda, as could any server maker or hyperscale datacenter operator with ARM aspirations of their own,” TPM writes, “The Fleet Services fabric interconnect that Calxeda developed is particularly valuable and can be dangerous falling into enemy hands.”

“If Barry Evans, the company’s co-founder, does manage to reorganize Calxeda with its investors, as he is currently trying to do, it is reasonable to expect the company to emerge to peddle this interconnect technology in a more generic way. Perhaps Calxeda can license the Fleet Services interconnect to other X86, Power, MIPS, and ARM chip makers, much as ARM Holdings licenses the ARM core designs to companies like Calxeda.”

Calxeda like others in the ARM microserver camp, including Applied Micro Systems, NVIDIA, Marvell Technology, Broadcom and Samsung, envisioned a future in which ARM server chips were the building blocks of energy-efficient clusters. Creating a new software-hardware ecosystem isn’t easy, however, and developing the 64-bit ARM servers may have required more time and capital than Calxeda bargained for. At a meeting on December 16, Calxeda backers opted to close shop and restructure the company. Most of the company’s 125 employees have been laid off.

Calxeda had previously raised a total of about $103 million in venture capital funding (a $48 million round in 2010 and an additional $55 million in October 2012). A source cited by AllThingsD said the company had tried to raise a fourth round of capital but was unsuccessful. Although specific reasons were not given for the folding, the same source said the company just ran out of money.

In a prepared statement, company president Barry Evans said, “Carrying the load of industry pioneer has exceeded our ability to continue to operate as we had envisioned. We wanted to let you know that Calxeda has begun a restructuring process. During this process, we remain committed to our customer’s success with ECX-2000 projects that are now underway.”

Karl Freund, who was vice president of marketing at Calxeda, confirmed to EnterpriseTech that the company will continue support for “Midway” ECX-2000 processors. The Midway chips, which tout 32-bit ARM cores with 40-bit extended memory addressing, were positioned as a bridge between the current 32-bit ARM chips and future 64-bit versions. Unveiled at the end of October 2013, they are due to appear in systems in the first half of 2014.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/01/06/calxeda-closes-shop-attempts-restructure/feed/0Dell Buys Dell In Order To Expand Its Datacenter Server Businesshttp://www.hpcwire.com/2013/02/06/dell_buys_dell_moving_into_datacenter_servers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dell_buys_dell_moving_into_datacenter_servers
http://www.hpcwire.com/2013/02/06/dell_buys_dell_moving_into_datacenter_servers/#commentsWed, 06 Feb 2013 08:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=4196<img style="float: left;" src="http://media2.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/dollar_sign_2.jpg" alt="" width="94" height="94" />Michael Dell's decision to take his company private is his attempt to solve The Innovator's Dilemma. He wants to get beyond the PC business and into datacenters and HPC. It's a bold and risky move, and may be his best chance of making the change happen.

]]>The term “The Innovator’s Dilemma” was coined by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, in a book of the same name, to describe what happens when new technology comes along to make old business models obsolete. Even innovative companies tend to focus on meeting the needs of their existing customers rather than cannibalizing their own products in order to meet a growing new market.

Michael Dell’s decision to buy his own company and take it off the public stock market is part of his strategy to solve his own Innovator’s Dilemma. He needs to focus on and expand his datacenter server business to replace his declining PC business.

Companies such as Dell, Microsoft and Intel all made their fortunes as pioneers in the personal computer business. They created the PC business and destroyed most of the mainframe and minicomputer makers in the process.

Now is the era of the next generation of devices. The PC business has been slipping under the shadow of hand-held devices, and the PC generation companies are facing the same kind of Dilemma they created for big computer makers four decades ago.

That’s why Dell and HP have started moving heavily into the next new disruptive business: servers and related products appropriate for datacenters. That’s a difficult transition to make. They must redirect investments from their large, existing markets into new businesses even though those markets are (for now) much smaller and the payoff won’t come for years. Shareholders don’t like the short-term hit on profits that requires. They bid down the stock, making the companies look like failing enterprises and worrying existing and potential customers. Competitors eye each other’s every move in order to try to outflank them.

Dell began looking at the server market half a dozen years ago with an eye to making big inroads into the datacenter business. It’s even making Intel’s dilemma a little worse by exploring the potential of ARM chips and microservers as a potential high-volume business in the datacenter, where Intel’s chips still dominate. Intel is, of course, responding to that threat as well.

“Dell clearly needed to undergo significant restructuring to better anticipate the future,” says technology analyst Rob Enderle, who has followed Dell and its competitors for decades. “They wanted to go back to a startup mode, where they could better surprise their competitors with a company better designed for the next decade.”

That future includes more than just servers and high-performance computing. It’s also working on mobile devices, tablets and other consumer products. But Dell, like Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and others of the same generation, have never been very successful breaking into those markets. So those companies are all aiming at the next wave, in datacenter servers, software and services.

Dell is putting a big emphasis on its corporate clients, focusing on technologies and products such as blade servers, rack servers, cloud computing, datacenter virtualization, networking and power and cooling systems—with client support services to help implement all these systems.

This deal should allow Dell to focus on efforts such as better integrating its different products into its servers. For example, in the last few years it bought several companies, such as data storage company Compellent Technologies and networking company Force10, but has not yet put them together into compelling packages.

Going private seemed like the best way to make this happen. The Wall Street Journalcites sources who say that CEO Michael Dell approached the company’s board of directors last year to explore the idea. The board formed a four member committee to investigate other options, including remaining a publicly-traded company, selling out to a larger corporation, and separating the PC business from the software and services businesses, which have higher margins. But none of the alternatives seemed feasible.

A big question is whether companies using Dell’s servers and other products in their datacenters will be willing to continue buying its products while the transition takes place.

It will cost Dell $24.4 billion to buy out the public shareholders. Mr. Dell, who is still one of the richest people in the country with a net worth of about $16 billion, is putting in an undisclosed amount of his own fortune, and possibly loan guarantees, to make it happen. That’s a big show of faith in his own ability to make the transition.

Investment company Silver Lake Partners is putting in $1 billion. Microsoft, which has been closely tied with Dell since its founding, has also offered Dell a $2 billion loan, helping ensure that it will have a future in Dell’s new markets. Bloomberg reports that Dell is also seeking $13.8 billion in loans, which may cost Dell $1.2 billion in interest payments. On the other hand, Dell has been paying out over $500 million a year in dividends to shareholders, which will now end.

Just securing that financing will be tough. If it succeeds in that effort, however, it’s good evidence that outsiders have faith that Mr. Dell, who will once again be the company’s biggest shareholder, can make the transition happen.

Rival Hewlett-Packard, facing the same Innovator’s Dilemma, is in a better financial position to execute its own transition. It has issued a press release pointing out that debt-heavy buyouts “tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb,” and is offering to help those customers out by selling them its own products. Still, HP is facing its own problems, including a disastrous acquisition of business software company Autonomy, which it now charges with fraud for falsifying its financial records to seem much more profitable than it is in order to inflate the purchase price. That forced HP to write off $8.8 billion, creating an enormous hit on its profitability.

Overall, Michael Dell is making a very bold move. But he’s also facing a big Dilemma. Bold moves are the only kind that deal with that kind of change.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2013/02/06/dell_buys_dell_moving_into_datacenter_servers/feed/0AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM Strategyhttp://www.hpcwire.com/2012/11/01/amd_unveils_64-bit_arm_strategy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=amd_unveils_64-bit_arm_strategy
http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/11/01/amd_unveils_64-bit_arm_strategy/#commentsThu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=4293<img style="float: left;" src="http://media2.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/AMD_ARM_logo_200x.jpg" alt="" width="121" height="42" />On Monday, AMD announced it is adding ARM-based Opterons to its portfolio, the first non-x86 server chips in the company's history. The new processors, due out in 2014, will use 64-bit ARM SoCs on top of its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric technology, and will be aimed at the datacenter and cloud space.

]]>On Monday, AMD announced it is adding ARM-based Opterons to its server portfolio, the first non-x86 Opterons in the company’s history. The new processors, due out in 2014, will use 64-bit ARM SoCs on top of its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric technology, and will be aimed at the datacenter and cloud space.

At the Monday morning press briefing, CEO Rory Reed examined the backdrop for this bold move. “There’s no doubt that the cloud changes everything,” he said. “The cloud truly is the killer app that’s unlocking the future; it’s driving the fastest level of growth across the industry. Over the last decade, we’ve seen an annual increase of about 33 percent in CAPEX spending in the datacenter on the large mega-datacenter cloud services, and that’s only going to continue to evolve and expand.”

The modern computing landscape is changing. The growing interest in energy-efficient microservers marks an important shift. For the past two decades, x86 has been the only (commodity) option for mainstream server computing, but the emergence of microservers gives ARM a unique opportunity to gain a foothold in the market.

Dell and HP both have a microserver play, and last month we saw Penguin Computing jump on the bandwagon. Intel is attempting to address the market with tweaked variants of its Atom and Xeon processors, but AMD will the first chipmaker to offer both 64-bit ARM and x86 server processors.

It’s the 64-bit aspect that will enable the ARM architecture to compete with x86 in the datacenter realm; 32-bit chips have a limited address reach (4 GB), which is problematic for server-sized datasets. Although 64-bit implementations of ARM aren’t expected until 2014, chipmakers are beginning to lay out their roadmaps today. Besides AMD, Calxeda and NVIDIA have also announced intentions to take 64-bit ARM silicon into the datacenter.

Until now making a datacenter more efficient meant increasing CPU horsepower or upping the core count. With the rise of cloud, mobile and Web computing, there are more bytes streaming into the datacenter. However, a lot of these Web era workloads are highly-parallelizable. ARM CPUs, which grew up inside mobile devices, are particularly efficient at these types of slice-and-dice workloads and have a power profile that is about one-third their x86 cousins.

Dr. Lisa Su, AMD senior vice president and general manager, talked about the product plans in more detail at the company’s ARM press event. “The biggest change in the datacenter is there is no one size fits all,” she emphasized.

AMD is positioning itself to offer a broad menu of choices to meet different kinds of datacenter workloads, and has apparently come to the conclusion that some of them are better served by ARM rather than x86. In particular, the company thinks ARM-based servers will be a good fit for clouds and mega-datacenters, but it’s still targeting its more powerful x86-based Opterons for the heavier lifting, like rendering, machine learning and HPC applications.

Even though AMD initially plans to direct its ARM portfolio to the generic cloud and Web service space, customers may get a bit more creative. For example, ARM could be the way to go for some embarrassingly parallel HPC applications like genomic analysis, which doesn’t need scads of floating point horsepower nor single-threaded performance. AMD would probably rather sell higher-end x86 Opterons to such users, but the market will do what it wants. And given the up-front and power costs of large clusters, HPC users can be particularly opportunistic.

Aside from adopting the ARM architecture, AMD will also incorporate its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric into the chips. This is the company’s secret sauce that they claim will set it apart from competing ARM SoCs. The fabric optimizes system performance by offering a high-bandwidth, low-latency system interconnect that keeps all the CPUs well fed with data.

While the ARM-based server design has a lot of promise, including higher compute per dollar and compute per watt, changing architectures can’t be done overnight. From the software perspective, the biggest difference between x86 and ARM parts is the instruction set. At the very least, applications and operating systems must be recompiled to support the new platform. Meanwhile software that is closer to the metal, like compilers, will have to be tweaked or, in some cases, developed from scratch.

So while it may seem premature to announce a product in 2012 that won’t be ready until 2014, it will take at least that long to bring the software up to speed. On AMD’s end, they’ll be busy completing the chip design and lining up OEM partners. Indeed, ecosystem development has been the main thrust of all the early microserver announcements.

The day after AMD dropped the big news, ARM unveiled its 64-bit Cortex-A50 processor series based upon the ARMv8 architecture, which it introduced a year ago. The implementations include the Cortex-A53, ARM’s most energy-efficient yet, and the Cortex-A57, the more performant version. According to the company, 64-bit execution will enable “new opportunities in networking, server and high-performance computing.” In addition to AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Samsung and STMicroelectronics are partnering with ARM to license the new processor series.

AMD is obviously betting on its new ARM-SeaMicro roadmap to help regain market share from its nemesis on the server front. AMD pioneered 64-bit x86 computing in 2003, and for a while, claimed a sizeable chunk of the business. After Intel followed suit with its 64-bit x86 offerings, AMD saw its market share steadily erode. Now that the chipmaker has, once again, decided to offer something completely different from Intel, we’ll see if history repeats itself.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/11/01/amd_unveils_64-bit_arm_strategy/feed/0AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM Strategyhttp://www.hpcwire.com/2012/11/01/amd_unveils_64-bit_arm_strategy-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=amd_unveils_64-bit_arm_strategy-2
http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/11/01/amd_unveils_64-bit_arm_strategy-2/#commentsThu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=8707On Monday, AMD announced it is adding ARM-based Opterons to its portfolio, the first non-x86 server chips in the company's history. The new processors, due out in 2014, will use 64-bit ARM SoCs on top of its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric technology, and will be aimed at the datacenter and cloud space.

]]>On Monday, AMD announced it is adding ARM-based Opterons to its server portfolio, the first non-x86 Opterons in the company’s history. The new processors, due out in 2014, will use 64-bit ARM SoCs on top of its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric technology, and will be aimed at the datacenter and cloud space.

At the Monday morning press briefing, CEO Rory Reed examined the backdrop for this bold move. “There’s no doubt that the cloud changes everything,” he said. “The cloud truly is the killer app that’s unlocking the future; it’s driving the fastest level of growth across the industry. Over the last decade, we’ve seen an annual increase of about 33 percent in CAPEX spending in the datacenter on the large mega-datacenter cloud services, and that’s only going to continue to evolve and expand.”

The modern computing landscape is changing. The growing interest in energy-efficient microservers marks an important shift. For the past two decades, x86 has been the only (commodity) option for mainstream server computing, but the emergence of microservers gives ARM a unique opportunity to gain a foothold in the market.

Dell and HP both have a microserver play, and last month we saw Penguin Computing jump on the bandwagon. Intel is attempting to address the market with tweaked variants of its Atom and Xeon processors, but AMD will the first chipmaker to offer both 64-bit ARM and x86 server processors.

It’s the 64-bit aspect that will enable the ARM architecture to compete with x86 in the datacenter realm; 32-bit chips have a limited address reach (4 GB), which is problematic for server-sized datasets. Although 64-bit implementations of ARM aren’t expected until 2014, chipmakers are beginning to lay out their roadmaps today. Besides AMD, Calxeda and NVIDIA have also announced intentions to take 64-bit ARM silicon into the datacenter.

Until now making a datacenter more efficient meant increasing CPU horsepower or upping the core count. With the rise of cloud, mobile and Web computing, there are more bytes streaming into the datacenter. However, a lot of these Web era workloads are highly-parallelizable. ARM CPUs, which grew up inside mobile devices, are particularly efficient at these types of slice-and-dice workloads and have a power profile that is about one-third their x86 cousins.

Dr. Lisa Su, AMD senior vice president and general manager, talked about the product plans in more detail at the company’s ARM press event. “The biggest change in the datacenter is there is no one size fits all,” she emphasized.

AMD is positioning itself to offer a broad menu of choices to meet different kinds of datacenter workloads, and has apparently come to the conclusion that some of them are better served by ARM rather than x86. In particular, the company thinks ARM-based servers will be a good fit for clouds and mega-datacenters, but it’s still targeting its more powerful x86-based Opterons for the heavier lifting, like rendering, machine learning and HPC applications.

Even though AMD initially plans to direct its ARM portfolio to the generic cloud and Web service space, customers may get a bit more creative. For example, ARM could be the way to go for some embarrassingly parallel HPC applications like genomic analysis, which doesn’t need scads of floating point horsepower nor single-threaded performance. AMD would probably rather sell higher-end x86 Opterons to such users, but the market will do what it wants. And given the up-front and power costs of large clusters, HPC users can be particularly opportunistic.

Aside from adopting the ARM architecture, AMD will also incorporate its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric into the chips. This is the company’s secret sauce that they claim will set it apart from competing ARM SoCs. The fabric optimizes system performance by offering a high-bandwidth, low-latency system interconnect that keeps all the CPUs well fed with data.

While the ARM-based server design has a lot of promise, including higher compute per dollar and compute per watt, changing architectures can’t be done overnight. From the software perspective, the biggest difference between x86 and ARM parts is the instruction set. At the very least, applications and operating systems must be recompiled to support the new platform. Meanwhile software that is closer to the metal, like compilers, will have to be tweaked or, in some cases, developed from scratch.

So while it may seem premature to announce a product in 2012 that won’t be ready until 2014, it will take at least that long to bring the software up to speed. On AMD’s end, they’ll be busy completing the chip design and lining up OEM partners. Indeed, ecosystem development has been the main thrust of all the early microserver announcements.

The day after AMD dropped the big news, ARM unveiled its 64-bit Cortex-A50 processor series based upon the ARMv8 architecture, which it introduced a year ago. The implementations include the Cortex-A53, ARM’s most energy-efficient yet, and the Cortex-A57, the more performant version. According to the company, 64-bit execution will enable “new opportunities in networking, server and high-performance computing.” In addition to AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Samsung and STMicroelectronics are partnering with ARM to license the new processor series.

AMD is obviously betting on its new ARM-SeaMicro roadmap to help regain market share from its nemesis on the server front. AMD pioneered 64-bit x86 computing in 2003, and for a while, claimed a sizeable chunk of the business. After Intel followed suit with its 64-bit x86 offerings, AMD saw its market share steadily erode. Now that the chipmaker has, once again, decided to offer something completely different from Intel, we’ll see if history repeats itself.

]]>Dell announced last week the development of a second ARM-based server platform, which it is donating to the Apache Software Foundation for software development and application porting. The Dell “Zinc” server concept runs Calxeda’s ARM-based EnergyCore EXC-1000 processors.

The “Zinc” ARM server follows the company’s “Copper” ARM server, which was announced in May. Low-power servers, or microservers as they’re also known, have been generating a lot of buzz in the datacenter and cloud space. Instead of the usual x86 chips, these servers rely on energy-efficient processors like the ones in cell phones and other mobile devices. For Web-era companies such as eBay and Amazon or even enterprise companies with large datacenters, microservers promise increased density and power efficiency, which in turn can spell lower total cost of ownership.

Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Server Solutions at Dell, provided the following prepared statement:

“With this donation, Dell is further working hand-in-hand with the community to enable development and testing of workloads for leading-edge hyperscale environments. We recognize the market potential for ARM servers, and with our experience and understanding of the market, are enabling developers with systems and access as the ARM server market matures.”

The Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 Series is based on the 32-bit Cortex-A9 processor. According to ServerWatch, the “Zinc” server is comprised of 24 Calxeda 4-core SOCs for a total of 96 cores, delivering 4 GB of RAM per node (96GB total). As for storage, there are 24 x 500GB SATA drives, and the nodes are connected with 10GbE links.

Beyond the hardware donation, Dell and Calxeda will also provide hosting and support for the microserver. Calxeda is hosting the “Zinc” server at an Austin-based colocation facility, where it will be remotely accessible for the ASF testers. Both companies will contribute to hardware maintenance, while the ASF infrastructure team will be responsible for systems management, such as access, patches and upgrades.

Earlier this year, Dell released its ARM-based “Copper” servers to select seed customers and ecosystem partners, such as Canonical and Cloudera. Developers were given remote access to the servers through a partnership with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

As with Copper, Zinc is not generally available, but the Apache contribution will enable ecosystem development, and Dell plans to bring the chip to market at “the appropriate time.”

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an all volunteer organization that oversees nearly 150 open source software projects and initiatives.

]]>Dell announced last week the development of a second ARM-based server platform, which it is donating to the Apache Software Foundation for software development and application porting. The Dell “Zinc” server concept runs Calxeda’s ARM-based EnergyCore EXC-1000 processors.

The “Zinc” ARM server follows the company’s “Copper” ARM server, which was announced in May. Low-power servers, or microservers as they’re also known, have been generating a lot of buzz in the datacenter and cloud space. Instead of the usual x86 chips, these servers rely on energy-efficient processors like the ones in cell phones and other mobile devices. For Web-era companies such as eBay and Amazon or even enterprise companies with large datacenters, microservers promise increased density and power efficiency, which in turn can spell lower total cost of ownership.

Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Server Solutions at Dell, provided the following prepared statement:

“With this donation, Dell is further working hand-in-hand with the community to enable development and testing of workloads for leading-edge hyperscale environments. We recognize the market potential for ARM servers, and with our experience and understanding of the market, are enabling developers with systems and access as the ARM server market matures.”

The Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 Series is based on the 32-bit Cortex-A9 processor. According to ServerWatch, the “Zinc” server is comprised of 24 Calxeda 4-core SOCs for a total of 96 cores, delivering 4 GB of RAM per node (96GB total). As for storage, there are 24 x 500GB SATA drives, and the nodes are connected with 10GbE links.

Beyond the hardware donation, Dell and Calxeda will also provide hosting and support for the microserver. Calxeda is hosting the “Zinc” server at an Austin-based colocation facility, where it will be remotely accessible for the ASF testers. Both companies will contribute to hardware maintenance, while the ASF infrastructure team will be responsible for systems management, such as access, patches and upgrades.

Earlier this year, Dell released its ARM-based “Copper” servers to select seed customers and ecosystem partners, such as Canonical and Cloudera. Developers were given remote access to the servers through a partnership with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

As with Copper, Zinc is not generally available, but the Apache contribution will enable ecosystem development, and Dell plans to bring the chip to market at “the appropriate time.”

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an all volunteer organization that oversees nearly 150 open source software projects and initiatives.

]]>Penguin Computing has launched its first ARM-based server platform. Known as the UDX1, the Penguin box is based on Calxeda’s latest ARM server chip, and is aimed at cloud computing, Web hosting, and, especially, data analytics – UD stands for Ultimate Data. The move puts Penguin into the front ranks of computer makers who are testing the waters for the burgeoning microserver market.

Although Penguin is best known for its HPC cluster offerings, it also sells into the enterprise space, from which it currently collects half its revenue. With established customers like Digg and Yelp, the company is looking to expand its footprint even further in the commercial arena. One of the ways it intends to do that is via the “big data” market, an application domain that spans genomic sequencing, risk analysis for stock portfolios, retail analytics and everything in between. Conveniently that encompasses the company’s HPC and enterprise customer bases.

The idea behind the UDX1 is to offer a less costly and more energy-efficient platform for these data-intensive applications. In general, x86 Xeon and Opteron servers offer more computational power than needed for applications that tend to be I/O bound. Therefore, rejiggering the compute-I/O balance by cutting back on thread/core performance can, at least in theory, offer a much more efficient solution.

That’s the premise of the microserver architecture, which uses less performant, but much lower power processors, such as ARM SoCs and low-power Intel Xeons and Atoms, to drive these throughput applications. In Penguin’s case, the UDX1 uses Calxeda’s latest EnergyCore ECX-1000 ARM server SoC, a quad-core chip that tops out at 5 watts. Each 4U enclosure houses up to 12 Calxeda modules, each holding four of those SoCs.

Note that the current crop of Calxeda server chips are based on 32-bit ARM, so there is that annoying limitation of a 4 GB memory reach. But for Hadoop-type workloads that can slice up datasets into bite-sized chunks, and scale out appropriately, this is a manageable problem.

Since each ARM chip comprises a complete server node, the UDX1 chassis offers 48 servers, in aggregate, (so 192 cores). Each node can hook into 4GB of DRAM and 36 1GB storage drives. Network switching is provided in the form of an on-chip network fabric supporting 10GbE connectivity between nodes, obviating the need for an external switch. In addition to on-chip Ethernet, the SoC includes integrated controllers for memory, PCIe, and SATA drives, as well as system management logic.

Since each of the servers runs 5 watts at full load, the whole chassis draws only 240 watts. Not bad for 192 cores. Obviously these are not Xeon cores; the ECX-1000 chip tops out at 1.4 GHz, which is less than half the speed of a top-end x86 server CPU. But in its intended space of divide-and-conquer-computing, there are a lot less wasted cycles waiting for I/O to catch up. At just a little over a watt per thread, energy-efficiency is an order of magnitude better than conventional server platforms.

According to Arend Dittmer, Penguin’s director of product marketing, a fully-populated UXD1 chassis will run about $30-35K. He says they already have a trio of orders for the new platform: one from a financial services firm, and the other two from national labs – all for data analytics work. At this point, the systems are being targeted for experimentation, rather than production, as customers kick the tires to see how well the Penguin box works under their analytics loads.

While the volume market for such microservers is going to be in the commercial space, Dittmer sees such systems filling a comfortable niche in HPC shops. He says, for mainstream science computation, where FLOPS are king, this is not the right platform (and doesn’t try to be). But since there is a finite amount of power and real estate in a datacenter, it makes sense to offload the data analytics work of science to more efficient hardware like the UXD1.

Penguin is not the only server maker utilizing Calxeda silicon. UK-based Boston Limited offers a very similar system to the UXD1, which they call Viridis. The Boston box is a 2U chassis that houses up to 48 Calxeda nodes and is aimed at essentially the same application space that Penguin is targeting. According to David Power, Boston’s Head of HPC, they have a 36-bay, 4U platform in the works, based on the same Calxeda SoCs.

Both vendors are already looking ahead to Calxeda’s plans for its 64-bit ARM SoC, which the company has code-named “Lago.” No one has committed to a date, but it’s reasonable to think that these chips should start to appear in the 2014 timeframe, with server implementations to follow shortly thereafter.

By that time, Penguin and Boston should have plenty of company. HP has been flirting with Calxeda for some time with its Project Moonshot development platform, but opted to go with Intel Atom CPUs for its initial microserver line. Dell has been dipping its toes into the microserver space as well, but gave the nod to Marvell’s quad-core Armada XP 78460 chip. IBM has yet to choose sides, but if these initial microserver platforms start to gain traction, you can bet Big Blue will figure out a way to get into the game.

]]>AMD’s SeaMicro division has announced new microservers and motherboards utilizing the group’s patented Freedom Fabric interconnect. It’s the first new offering from SeaMicro since they were acquired by AMD in February 2012. The new platform, known as the SM15000 is being promoted as “a big data cluster in a 10 rack unit box.”

The SM15000 microserver is designed to maximize bandwidth and storage density, while offering much higher energy efficiencies than conventional servers. As such, the gear is aimed at high-throughput, big data type workloads using frameworks like Hadoop and Cassandra. The SM15000 can handle standard enterprise software stacks, including traditional operating systems, like Windows and Linux, as well as hypervisors from VMware and Citrix.

Even though SeaMicro is now under the AMD umbrella, the new gear supports both Xeon and Opteron chips. An SM15000 chassis can house up to 64 mini-motherboards, which support the upcoming “Piledriver” Opterons as well as low-power “Ivy Bridge” and “Sandy Bridge” Xeon processors. Compute configurations are as follows:

To max out memory for Piledriver configurations, the motherboards need to be equipped with pricier 16GB DIMMs, a disadvantage for those who want to take advantage of the higher memory capacity.

The Freedom Fabric is the magic glue that makes this system unique. It supports 10 gigabits/sec of throughput to each socket and the ability to drive 16 10GigE or 64 GigE uplinks per chassis. In aggregate, the fabric supplies 1.28 terabits/sec of bandwidth.

The system also pushes the envelope on storage capacity. A fully-outfitted chassis can support 64 HDD or SSD SATA drives, one per compute card. A two-rack SM15000 system encompassing 16 storage enclosures can house up to 1,408 disks, or a whopping 5 petabytes. If more storage is needed, the fabric can be extended to link up additional enclosures.

The SM15000 equipped with Sandy Bridge CPUs are shipping today. For those wanting Piledriver- or Ivy Bridge-based systems, they’ll have to wait until November. Starting prices are around $140K.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/09/11/amd_offers_five_petabytes_of_freedom/feed/0Calxeda Takes Aim at Big Data HPC with ARM Server Chiphttp://www.hpcwire.com/2012/05/31/calxeda_takes_aim_at_big_data_hpc_with_arm_server_chip/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=calxeda_takes_aim_at_big_data_hpc_with_arm_server_chip
http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/05/31/calxeda_takes_aim_at_big_data_hpc_with_arm_server_chip/#commentsThu, 31 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=4466<img style="float: left;" src="http://media2.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/Calxeda_energycore_small.jpg" alt="" width="90" height="82" />With Dell's news this week of its renewed plans to bring ARM-based servers to datacenters and Intel's recent unveiling of new Xeon CPUs aimed at ultra-low-power servers, the "microserver" marketplace is being primed for some commercial offerings. Chip startup Calxeda has been working to bring its own ARM-based SoC technology into the datacenter and, with the help of its OEM partners, the company is positioning the technology for its commercial debut.

The microserver phenomenon is just emerging, but it has all the earmarks of a disruptive market shift. The concept was invented to more closely match hardware capabilities with evolving datacenter workloads and energy usage. A near insatiable demand for Web-based serving and content delivery and a plethora of big data applications, combined with the escalating costs of power and cooling, has forced CPU makers to rethink their priorities. Calxeda, Marvell, Intel, and others recognized these trends forming years ago and started designing ultra-low-power parts aimed at these high-growth application areas.

High performance computing is somewhat on the periphery of this phenomenon. The HPC user’s obsession with performance, especially floating point performance, is rather at odds with these FLOP-challenged chips. And for the initial crop of ARM-based servers, there is the additional limitation of 32-bit computing, which cuts across both HPC and enterprise computing.

Calxeda’s EnergyCore processor, for example, is a quad-core ARM chip of Cortex A9 vintage, the same 32-bit architecture that powers the latest dual-core iPad (sans the PowerVR GPU). And although the Calxeda chip is marginally faster than the iPad chip, its top speed is just 1.4 GHz. With less than half the clock frequency and half the number of cores of a midrange Xeon CPU, the EnergyCore has about 1/10 the overall performance of a Sandy Bridge E5-2600.

The upside, of course, is power usage. While that same 8-core Sandy Bridge part has a 100-watt TDP, the EnergyCore SoC maxes out at less than less than 4 watts. And that includes a high performance on-chip fabric switch, which eliminates the need for a lot of network cabling and energy-sucking switches. The chip also incorporates a management engine that does high-level functions like intelligent node routing and power optimization.

When you add in 4 GB of RAM, a complete Calxeda server is only 5 watts. A four-node, 16-core reference board designed by Calxeda consumes just 20 watts and is 10 inches long.

The catch is that the application has to parallelize rather well. According to the chipmaker, what would have taken 400 servers of a conventional x86 setup now requires 1,600 Calxeda-based servers, albeit with just 1/10 the power requirement, 1/20 the rack footprint, and less than half the up-front costs. That level of savings is attracting a lot of attention from users with cluster apps that can scale reasonably well but don’t require scads of single-threaded performance or raw FLOPS.

That represents a large number of Web and enterprise workloads, but there is also a rather nice subset of HPC applications that can take advantage of this platform. According to Calxeda vice president of marketing Karl Freund, a lot of data-heavy HPC applications are fair game for ARM clusters. Any MapReduce/Hadoop-type application or really any code that is I/O- or memory-bound, rather than compute-bound, is a “great fit” says Freund.

It includes a number of big data-ish apps like financial and risk modeling, seismic codes, and various type of signal processing workloads. Freund also thinks there’s a case to be made here for genomic analysis. In these applications, performance tends to be constrained by the bottleneck at external storage and/or main memory, so you don’t need a fast clock on the CPU; it’s going to be waiting for data regardless of its GHz rating.

In fact, for data-bound codes, the slower the chip the better the performance per watt. That’s the essential design point of these ARM server chips, since they are geared for throughput processing on embarrassingly parallel workloads. And in many cases, you don’t need that much floating point horsepower either.

Even for traditional HPC science simulations, where floating point performance is often critical, the Calxeda solution might be the way to go. Although Freund admits that their CPU is not designed for FP performance, the hardware does include an FPU with both single and double precision FP support, not to mention a NEON SIMD engine with even better single precision performance. But it is by no means a high-end floating point microprocessor in the fashion of a Xeon or an Opteron.

Even in HPC though, that’s not always necessary. In conversations with users at Sandia National Labs, Freund related that only about 5 percent of the aggregate cycles on the labs’ simulation codes were double precision floating point operations. That suggests the Calxeda offering might be able to effectively negotiate a simulation code, slowing down on the floating point curves and making up time on the integer straightaways.

Another consideration is the movement toward heterogenous computing in HPC, where GPUs and to a lesser extent, FPGAs, are being employed as computational accelerators. Where applications can take advantage of such acceleration, a low-power ARM, rather than a big Xeon or Opteron, may be all that’s necessary for a host-side CPU. Freund says at least one customer is toying with the idea of hooking a Calxeda-based server to an FPGA for just such an arrangement.

To date, the company has attracted five OEMs that have designed servers around the EnergyCore SoC. HP and Boston Limited have demonstrated their Calxeda gear in public. HP’s offering, the Redstone Development Platform (4U 288 nodes), is not a commercial product, per se. It’s being distributed to select customers for testing and evaluation only. The Boston Limited platform, known as Viridis (2U 48 nodes), is also in the pre-commercial stage and is likewise being distributed to “interested parties.” And although Dell’s “Copper” microserver is officially powered by Marvell’s ARM server chip, the server maker is also in cahoots with Calxeda on other designs.

The remaining two Calxeda OEMs will remain nameless for the time being. However, according to Freund, three of the five system vendors should begin shipping Calxeda-powered servers in volume by Q4 of this year.

In the meantime, Sandia and MIT have signed up as beta sites for running some HPC codes through Calxeda hardware. A set of HPC libraries and packages have already been ported to the platform, including various flavors of MPI, BLAS, ScaLAPACK, Ganglia (monitoring) and Condor (checkpointing). Language support, including C, Fortran, Perl, Python, and Ruby is there as well.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/05/31/calxeda_takes_aim_at_big_data_hpc_with_arm_server_chip/feed/0Intel Rolls Out New Server CPUshttp://www.hpcwire.com/2012/05/14/intel_rolls_out_new_server_cpus/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=intel_rolls_out_new_server_cpus
http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/05/14/intel_rolls_out_new_server_cpus/#commentsMon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=4472<img style="float: left;" src="http://media2.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/Intel-Corp_small.jpg" alt="" width="90" height="65" />Intel Corp. has launched three new families of Xeon processors, joining the Xeon E5-2600 series the chipmaker introduced in March. These latest chips span the entire market for the Xeon line, from four- and two-socket servers, down to entry-level workstations and microservers. A number of HPC server makers, including SGI, Dell, and Appro announced updated hardware based on the new silicon.

]]>Intel Corp. has launched three new families of Xeon processors, joining the Xeon E5-2600 series the chipmaker introduced in March. These latest chips span the entire market for the Xeon line, from four- and two-socket servers, down to entry-level workstations and microservers. A number of HPC server makers, including SGI, Dell, and Appro announced updated hardware based on the new silicon.

The newest Xeon of greatest interest to high performance computing is the Sandy Bridge E5-4600 series, which is built for four-socket servers. At the CPU level, the E5-4600 is more or less identical to the E5-2600 for two-socket systems, both of which are available in 4-, 6-, and 8-core flavors, support 4 memory channels, include 40 lanes of integrated PCIe 3.0, and come with up to 20 MB of last level cache. The four-socket E5-4600 can support twice as much memory per system (up to 1.5 TB) as its two-socket counterpart, but that just serves to keep the per processor and per core memory ratio in line.

In normal times, the new four-socket Xeon would simply take the place of the older technology, in this case the Xeon E7 (“Westmere-EX”), but Intel has moved the new chip into a somewhat different role. According to Michele Fisher, a senior product marketing engineer at Intel, the E5-4600 is intended to complement the E7, rather than replace it. Specifically, the Sandy Bridge version is a “cost and density optimized” CPU for four-socket servers, which in this case is reflected in less cores (maxing out at 8 instead of 10 on the Westmere-EX), a lower memory capacity (1.5 TB instead of 2.0 TB), and less RAS support. It’s also less expensive. The price range on the new four-socket Xeons is $551 to $3,616; on the older Westmere E7 chips, it’s $774 to $4,616.

The idea, says Fisher, is to target the new four-socket CPUs for dense, scale-out systems in domains like HPC and telco, and to support growing geographies like China, which are especially cost-conscious. And because of their density and better energy efficiency, the new CPUs are especially suitable for four-socket blade servers. The older E7 chips will continue to be sold into more traditional enterprise systems, in particular, high-end transactional database machines, where the larger memory footprint and high reliability features are most appreciated.

Since the E5-4600 supports the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), courtesy of the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, the new chip can do floating point operations at twice the clip of its pre-AVX predecessors. According to Intel, a four-socket server outfitted with E5-4650 CPUs can deliver 602 gigaflops on Linpack, which is nearly twice the flops that can be achieved with the top-of the-line E7 technology. That makes this chip a fairly obvious replacement for the E7 when the application domain is scientific computing.

Which explains why SGI is upgrading its Altix UV shared memory supercomputing platform from the E7 to the E5-4600. Also, since the UV has SGI’s custom NUMAlink interconnect and node controller, that system can scale well beyond the four sockets and 1.5 TB of cache coherent memory based on the native Intel chipset.

In fact, SGI’s new Sandy Bridge-based UV can scale up to 4,096 cores and 64 TB of memory in a single system. That’s twice the number of cores and four times the memory of the older Westmere-based UV. And because of the chip’s AVX support, peak flops per UV rack has doubled, from 5.4 to 11 teraflops.

SGI has already sold one of its new UVs to the COSMOS Consortium, a group that uses HPC to support origin-of-the-universe type research associated with Stephen Hawking’s cosmology work. Some of the simulations are designed to reveal the nature of the universe immediately after — as in one second after — the Big Bang. The computer will also support other cosmology research, including searching for planets outside our solar system.

Dell is also using the E5-4600, but in more conventional HPC gear. It’s putting the new Xeon into its four-socket PowerEdge M820 and R820, a blade and rackmount server, respectively. The M820 can house up to 10 full-height blades in 10U chassis, while the half-as-dense rackmount R820 puts a single four-socket server into a 2U box.

A couple steps down performance-wise from the E5-4600 is Intel’s new Sandy Bridge E5-2400, aimed at lower-end two socket servers. It’s designed to be a more energy-efficient alternative to the original two-socket E5-2600. It’s also considerably cheaper, with a price range of $188 to $1,440.

The E5-2400 series spans the same core counts as E5-2600, but gets by with one less memory channel (3), fewer PCIe lanes (24), and maxes out at half the memory (384 GB) of its older sibling. More importantly, they tend to be slower chips; the top-end E5-2440 is nearly full gigahertz slower (2.4 GHz) than the fastest E5-2600. But that translates into less power draw — from 60 watts on the low end part, up to 95 watts at the top end.

Their energy efficiency and cost make them suitable for scale-out clusters that don’t require a lot of single-threaded horsepower. Dell, for example, is using the E5-2400 processors in their new M420 blade, which is being positioned for some HPC-type workloads, especially animation and CGI rendering. The M420 is the first quarter-height dual-socket blade in the market; 32 of the mini-blades (1024 cores) can be squeezed into a 10U chassis. As with the four-socket gear, Dell is also offering a rackmount counterpart, the R420.

SGI is using the E5-2400 CPU as the base processor for its the Hadoop clusters, as well as in its Rackable server line for more general enterprise duty. For many Hadoop applications, which tend to be bound by data movement, rather than raw computational muscle, this chip could be a nice fit. And even though it’s slower than the mainline E5-2600 chips, SGI is still promising 22 percent better price-performance and 27 percent better performance/watt than the corresponding Westmere EP-based Hadoop gear.

The third new Xeon is the one-socket E3-1200 v2, a 22nm Ivy Bridge CPU for entry-level servers and workstations. Offered in dual-core and quad-core configurations, prices range from $189 to $884. The fastest part, at 3.7 GHz, offers quite respectable performance, but with only 8 MB of cache and a maximum memory capacity of 32 GB, the chip might be a bit of a stretch for HPC duty.

The family also includes two interesting new CPUs aimed at the microserver market, including Intel’s lowest powered Xeon, the E3-1220L v2. With a TDP of just 17 watts, that’s approaching ARM CPU territory. For example, Calexda makes a quad-core ARM chip for microservers that draws 5 watts, but that’s a 32-bit CPU, which limits its application in the server room rather substantially. The 64-bit E3 Xeon would have no such problem.

Intel is not positioning these new microserver Xeons for high performance computing; ostensibly they’re targeted for front-end web workloads, content delivery, and dedicated hosting. However, some creative server maker might be able to design a nifty little one-socket box with the E3-1220L v2 that could be used for some types of embarrassingly parallel codes. But since Intel would much rather sell its higher end E5 Xeons to its HPC customers, we’re not likely to see a Xeon-based microservers in supercomputers anytime soon.